Archbishop thrown into row over US Middle East policy

Archbishop thrown into row over US Middle East policy | Guardian Unlimited

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself plunged into political controversy yesterday after remarks made during the course of a wide-ranging interview for a Muslim magazine were translated into an all-out attack on American policy in the Middle East.

The archbishop told Emel magazine in what it described as "a series of profound views expressed in serene tranquillity" that the US had lost the moral high ground since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and that Washington's attempts to accumulate influence and control in the region were not working.

He was quoted as saying: "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that's what the British empire did - in India, for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things back together - Iraq, for example."

"Interpreted as"? I'm not sure I would call it an attack, but "very strong critique" would work. He's right. We lost the moral high ground a long time ago. Ironically, General Petraeus was one of the few on the scene who understood this, but his appointment to handle the Iraq fiasco happened far too late for him to do anything about it.

Petraeus oversaw a program of public works and political reinvigoration in Mosul,^[27][28] launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.^[29] The New York Times has stated that "from the first day they arrived in Mosul, Bravo Company and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division were saddled with dozens of other missions, all of them distinctly nonmilitary, and most of them made necessary by the failure of civilian leaders in Washington and Baghdad to prepare for the occupation of Iraq."^[30] Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David',^[31][32] which was later adopted by some of his colleagues.^[33][34][35] Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."^[36]

Wikipedia